"This word: shame. No, I must write it in its original form, not in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners' unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write and so for ever alter what is written... "Sharam, that's the word. For which this paltry 'shame' is a whole inadequate translation. Three letters, shin rè mìm (written, naturally, from right to left); plus zabar accents indicating the short vowel sounds. A short word, but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance. It is not only shame that his mothers forbade Omar Khayyam to feel, but also embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterparts." Part 1 Chapter 2, pg. 33.

"This was the time immediately before the famous moth-eaten partition that chopped...